by Nadia Gordon
The group turned to Remy, who stood stone-faced. Andre flicked his eyes to Sunny. She thought she detected more than a hint of irritation. Pel and Sharon looked at Eliot, smiling slightly with anticipation of a heartwarming anecdote. Nick continued. He seemed to relish the opportunity to make a presentation. “It started a couple of years ago. Eliot, you’d been complaining about the comp tab at the bar. Remy pointed out that about half of it could be eliminated if we could persuade Nathan to drink a VSOP instead of his usual. As there was little chance of that, we decided to take matters into our own hands.” He explained about the two bottles. The group shifted nervously. Sunny looked at Dahlia, who stared at Nick with an amused look on her face. She turned to Eliot. His face had drained of color.
Nick held up the bottle. “As luck would have it, we’ve been blessed with the real stuff. Personally, I am going to assume it was the ghost of Nathan Osborne who returned it, and the fact that he chose to return the genuine article is his way of saying no hard feelings. Wherever he is, I hope Nathan will forgive me. It was, mostly, for the greater good of Vinifera.”
There was another round of chuckles. Most people seemed comfortable with the story. Nick pulled the cork and poured a splash in each glass. “Everyone take a glass and we’ll have a toast,” he said, as the glasses circulated. “Eliot, would you do the honors?”
Eliot stood rigid with his glass stiffly in hand. He looked around the table, his eyes darting from one face to another in a mute display of panic. All eyes on him, they waited, glasses at the ready. He looked from one end of the table to the other, woefully, then turned back to Nick. All the while he said nothing.
Andre cleared his throat nervously and put on an over-gracious smile. He shot Nick an icy look. “Maybe Eliot needs a moment to think,” he said. “It’s been a difficult week for all of us. It’s usually better to give people a little notice before they’re going to be put on the spot.” Nick looked suddenly deflated and a deep blush spread across his cheeks.
Sunny avoided Nick’s eyes and pinched the foot of her glass, swirling the splash of golden liquid. Andre continued. “Nathan and I had our differences,” he said, “but we shared an appreciation for authenticity and craftsmanship. Nathan was a perfectionist, and if we differed in our opinions on what constituted perfection, we shared the belief that satisfaction was to be found in attention to detail. Nathan was exactly the kind of man who would have been deeply annoyed by the prank Nick has just described, if it weren’t for his sense of humor, the trait that saved him from being boorish. He will be missed.”
Andre raised his glass and around the table others stood, waiting to drink as soon as his toast was finished. “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. To Nathan.”
“Stop!” yelled Eliot. “No one drink. Do not drink.” Eliot cast a pleading look around the table. “No one must drink the Armagnac.”
“What is it?” asked Andre.
“Osborne,” choked Eliot. “That son of a bitch. You have to understand. He ruined me. He destroyed Denby’s, destroyed my dreams. But that wasn’t good enough. He had to play the same game all over again.” He turned on Andre ferociously. “He drained the restaurant. He didn’t even need the money, Andre. Do you know what’s in those precious alcoves downstairs? Nothing. Most of that wine is practically worthless. Everything I ever worked for was a big joke to him. When I confronted him, he just laughed.”
25
Monty heaved an armload of vine canes onto the fire. He stared into the heart of orange embers and watched the flames lick up around the new fuel. Sunny picked up a stray cane and poked at the blaze, flicking errant stalks back into the heat. They’d been burning vine trimmings all morning in a light drizzle. Rivka stood meditatively testing the toe of her rubber boot against the fire, seeing how long it could tolerate the heat.
Monty tossed another armful of cane onto the fire and pushed the wheelbarrow back into the tool shed. He came back looking pleased with himself. “That’s it. That’s the last of it.”
“I still can’t believe you were right,” said Rivka.
“Neither can Steve Harvey,” said Sunny. She shivered. “He was still shaking his head when I met him this morning. Remy has been talking a blue streak. They’re going to test Osborne’s body today. I hope those guys in forensics make good money.”
“Forget the guys in the lab, what about the folks who have to dig him up?” said Monty. “You couldn’t pay me enough.”
They sat silently watching the bonfire until it had burned down to a circle of white ash with a marmalade core, then walked up to the house to make a late lunch. Monty and Rivka stood out on the deck, staring at the fog sitting low on the bare vineyard. Wade Skord, whose home they were enjoying like it was their own, would be back in a week. The burning could have waited for his return or his return from the next year’s vacation for that matter, but the day had been perfect for it and Sunny had craved it: the smell, the mesmerizing undulations of flame, the crackle of the dry canes, the heat on her face and cold day at her back. Monty and Rivka felt the same way. They’d jumped at the first mention of the word bonfire.
Sunny came out of the house onto the deck carrying a bottle of wine. She splashed some into Monty’s glass. He wrinkled his nose. “Not the Safeway Red again.”
“You’re always so snobby about my Falcon Crest special,” said Sunny. “I think it’s entirely drinkable, especially for the price. You should give it a chance. Just taste it once without expecting to hate it.”
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You were extremely lucky. What if you were wrong and the poison wasn’t yew tree? All you tested that Armagnac for was taxine. What if it had arsenic or ant poison or who knows what else in it? What if Eliot hadn’t snapped? You could have killed off the whole staff at Vinifera in one blow.”
Sunny filled her own glass. “It frightens me to admit that I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You think it frightens you. I’m the one who’d have to deal with the ramifications. Who would I have dinner with on Friday nights if you two weren’t here?”
“Your girlfriend?” Sunny said.
“Annabelle? I should be so lucky. The woman spends more time on the road than Mick Jagger.”
“I suppose if no one had come forward I would have had the sense to stop everyone from drinking,” said Sunny. “At least I hope I would have. Except it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that that bottle might have something else toxic in it. I was so focused on the yew tree aspect.”
“Can we stop poking around other people’s affairs now?” said Rivka. “I just want everything to get back to normal.”
“I’m still shocked that Nathan Osborne never guessed he was being duped by Castels serving him whatever wine happened to be around, let alone Cognac in place of Armagnac,” said Monty. “The guy knew everything there was to know about wine and brandy.”
“He was so busy practicing his own deceit he probably never had time to wonder what other people were up to,” said Sunny. “He spent more than a decade defrauding Eliot Denby.”
“What made Eliot suspicious in the first place?” asked Rivka. “He hadn’t figured it out in ten years.”
“I wondered that too,” said Sunny. “Apparently Eliot stumbled across one of Nathan’s phony invoices by accident. It was marked received with a date that was still a week away and he got suspicious. He confronted Remy, Remy confessed everything he knew to save his own hide, and they cut a deal. Eliot said he’d let Remy off if he kept quiet and didn’t tell anyone he had figured out what was going on. Eliot said he would straighten things out with Nathan; Remy didn’t know how. He thought Eliot was keeping quiet because he didn’t want the press to get hold of the story.”
“We nailed that whole broken bottle fiasco early on,” said Monty. “I’ll take credit for that, if you don’t mind. I knew it was Remy.”
“Uh, I think that was me, but you can take credit if you want,” said Sunny.
“And
why did he do it? Why not just leave it there?” said Rivka.
“Remy was terrified,” said Sunny. “He had all the pressure he could handle worrying about whether or not Eliot was going to turn him in. The last thing he wanted was for Nathan to see his bit of handiwork with the wine-club Marceline. He probably knew Nathan well enough to guess that he would use it in any way he could. Blackmail, for example. So, in a panic, Remy decided to sneak into Nathan’s house and swap the fake Marceline with the real stuff, just like we guessed. Everything was fine until he spotted Nathan and was so startled he dropped the bottle he was carrying.”
“While we’re hashing through all this, how did Eliot manage to leave the note on your car? Wasn’t he at the restaurant the whole time yesterday?” asked Rivka.
“He didn’t, Remy left it. I assumed it was about Nathan, but it wasn’t. Remy was afraid I was going to expose his wine-club fraud. He had no idea Nathan hadn’t died a natural death.”
“It’s a shame he’ll go to jail,” said Monty. “One less Master Sommelier on the continent. We’ll have to make due with forty-one of them now.”
“He and Nathan had so many scams running at Vinifera it was a full-time job keeping track of them,” said Sunny.
“And what about the Bandol you came to see me about. How did that figure in?” asked Monty.
“That was what first got me thinking it wasn’t Remy after all,” said Sunny. “When I went to see Eliot on Friday, he showed me his prize possession, a bottle of Bandol that Nathan had given him when they opened Denby’s back in the day. It was in the safe with the accounting ledgers, so it survived the fire. It predated Remy’s employment. When I felt the punt and realized it was a fake, I knew everything couldn’t be Remy’s doing and Nathan wasn’t what he seemed. It would take a genuinely mean spirit to start a partnership with a lie. We’ll never know for sure, but I think it’s pretty clear that the Denby’s fire was arson. Nathan had been filling the cellar at Denby’s with cheap wine for five years. He needed to get rid of the evidence so he could start again.”
“You figured if Eliot had found out about Nathan, he had a motive,” said Monty.
“The worst kind, revenge,” said Sunny. “I wasn’t sure he knew until Nick told me Eliot had been working late, trying to find a way to save the business. That didn’t fit with what Eliot had said in our meeting. He’d given me the impression that business was booming. I realized he was lying because he didn’t want anyone to know the business was in trouble. That could lead to all kinds of unpleasant questions, such as why it was in trouble, considering the place was busy every night. Eliot had to keep Nathan’s fraud a secret and play down the restaurant’s financial problems in order to keep his motive hidden.
“Then I remembered the stack of old ledgers on his desk and figured they dated back to the Denby’s era. It was true that he’d been working late making computations, but he wasn’t trying to save the business. He was calculating how much Nathan had taken him for over the years. It was an obsession. He kept doing it even after he’d killed him.”
“And all that wine locked up at Vinifera was fake,” said Rivka. “I still don’t see how they did it.”
“Not fake, just wrong,” explained Sunny. “Remy would place an order for a bunch of high-end wines. Nathan would intercept it on his wholesaler end and replace it with an order for less expensive stock. Osborne Wines would deliver that order, and the regular guy at Vinifera would receive it so everything looked legit. Then when the invoice went to Remy, he’d swap it out with the original invoice, lock up the stock in the alcoves so nobody was the wiser, and they’d split the take.”
“Sounds complicated,” said Rivka. “And risky.”
“I think fraud usually is,” said Sunny. “If people put half as much effort into doing things the right way, they’d probably make just as much money and they wouldn’t have to worry about getting caught.”
“A nice sentiment, but untrue,” said Monty. “Let’s say a wholesaler buys a bottle of wine for ten dollars. Using Osborne’s strategy, the wholesaler sells it for a hundred dollars to the restaurant, but then switches invoices. On paper it now looks like the wholesaler sold a ten-dollar bottle of wine for twenty—the usual hundred percent markup. Since he actually sold it for a hundred, he just made eighty dollars more than he should have, tax free. Well, forty, since he has to give the guy on the inside his cut.”
“You’re probably being more generous than Nathan was,” said Sunny.
“I still don’t get how Eliot knew which bottle of Armagnac to poison,” said Rivka.
“He didn’t, since he never knew there were two. He was just lucky. Or unlucky, depending on how you look at it,” said Sunny.
“Hang on, I need to sort this out,” said Rivka. “All of this bottle switching still has me confused.”
“It’s actually very simple,” said Sunny, swirling her wine. “Last Friday night Nick put the fake bottle out, locked the real one in the cabinet, and went home. Eliot sneaks in and doses the one that’s out. On Saturday, Nick comes into work and switches them around like he always does. He puts the real stuff out and locks the fake stuff in the cabinet. Later that night, Remy orders a glass for Nathan. He evidently gives Nick the sign to use the fake stuff. Nick takes that bottle—the one with Eliot’s little present in it—out of the cabinet and pours it. Nathan drinks it, goes home, and dies. Meanwhile, at the end of his shift, Nick does the usual. He locks the real bottle in the cabinet and puts the fake one—the one with the poison in it—on the shelf before he leaves. Eliot nabs the bottle off the shelf late that night and gets rid of it. The real bottle stays in the cabinet until Monday, when they find out about Nathan’s death and Dahlia uses a key to make off with the real bottle.”
“I may never order a digestif again,” said Monty.
“I keep thinking of what Catelina told me,” said Sunny. “‘It’s not what they say is in there that’s the problem, it’s what’s in there that they don’t say.’”
“Enough with the Portuguese aphorisms,” said Monty, “and for the love of god, let’s open a decent bottle of wine. Life is too short to drink mediocre wine, especially on Sunday when there’s a cellar not fifty yards away stocked with great Zinfandel hoping for a visitor.”
He marched to the railing and dumped the contents of his glass over the side. Sunny winced.
“What?” Monty asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Sunny said.
“What?”
She picked up the bottle and scraped at the label with her fingernail, eventually separating the top label from the one underneath. She peeled it away and handed the bottle to Monty, who took one look and said, “You bitch.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“That was really low.”
“It wasn’t meant to be a joke,” said Sunny, laughing. “It was just an experiment. I wanted to see if you could really tell the difference.”
“Let’s see,” said Rivka, taking the bottle. “Oh Lenstrom, that’s gotta hurt. 1991 Shafer Hillside Select Cabernet Sauvignon. If you hurry you can probably still suck a few drops off the grass.”
Monty made a sour face. Sunny poured another glass and handed it to him. He took it without looking at her.
“What about Andre?” said Monty, trying to recover. “You haven’t said a peep about him.”
“I figure I’ll let the dust settle, then give him a call and see where we are.”
“He’ll be there for you, don’t worry,” said Rivka. “And that reminds me. Dahlia gave me something to give to you.” She took a little parcel wrapped in tissue paper out of her pocket and handed it to Sunny. She unwrapped it and spread out the tissue on her palm. Inside was a leather cord with a forest green pouch attached, just big enough to hold the tiny glass vial inside. “What is it?” she asked.
“An amulet,” said Rivka. “It’s called New Beginnings.”
“New beginnings,” said Sunny, putting it around her neck. “I like the sound of that.”
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nbsp; Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
PART ONE Faux Finish
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
PART TWO Still Life
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
PART THREE The Last Supper
20
21
22
23
24
25
